The Danville News

Robert John Andrews

February 19, 2026

“Oblio”

Word Count: 750

 

It was the size of a Russet Potato, so the radiologist later described.  All the specialists did their job admirably, beginning with the neurosurgeon and her surgical team who excavated the tumor from the front of the brain.  We called it familiarly, Oblio, after the main character in that animated special, “The Point.”  Said the Rock Man:  “You don’t have to have yourself a point to have yourself a point. “  The potato’s official name was oligodendroglomia.  Fortunately, as verified by subsequent cellular study, it wasn’t the other more insidious one, glioblastoma, with its lethality rate.  First came surgery, then came radiation, soon enough begins the oral medication and port for chemotherapy.  

 

Who else have been involved in this gestalt healing process?  A medley of professionals who know how to do their job.  They realize they must work in concert.  Harmony in the quest for cure.  Far better than chaos, cacophony, and ego.   Thank you, neurosurgery, nurses, technicians, transport, housekeeping, food service, OT, PT, MRI, X-ray, CATscan, radiation therapy, oncology, speech therapy. 

 

Imagine how hard it would be to go through such ordeals lacking support from family, friends, your religious community.  Many of you don’t have to imagine this.  Given the recent tendency for early discharge, who arranges the follow-up, the scheduling, the pill taking, getting around to the grocery store or medical appointments?  Who helps provide the recovering patient’s need for care-givers to offer security and encouragement?

 

Whether illness requiring orthopedic fixes, kidney dialysis, measles vaccinations, or cancer treatment, collaboration is key.  Collaboration among medical teams, whether here at UC Health or at Geisinger, serve as a method for holding co-workers and specialists accountable to fulfill their oaths, doing their jobs.  Collaboration, along with their willingness to listen through consultation, results in fostering trust in their professionalism by patients and family for whom the world of the medical shamans can be a daunting mystery. Character and competence are essentials for persons placed in positions of public trust.   Could this be an allegory?

 

It remains important to avoid target fixation (“Looking for the giant whilst being eaten by the ant,” as our tumor patient quipped).  Vital also are patient advocates to help the individual providers see and appreciate their role in the bigger picture of recovery and cure.  After all, it’s hard to convey ahead of time what difficulties will be experienced.  When can work be resumed?  Why is so much harder to connect the dots?  How long will it be until the patient can drive again?  Who will help the patient navigate health care insurance, disability claims?  The implications of the tumor, particularly with regard to compromising the brain’s executive function, became discovered in process.   

 

A medical ethicist and theologian described how sickness changes our identity, changing our habits, our relationships, our faith and beliefs, character, behaviors.  Sickness, he wrote, is an event that forces a break in the past, a perilous transition, and a reconstruction of the self.  There’s the ticket.  What is needed for the big picture of the reconstruction of the self? 

 

There was a reason Civil War offices rode horses into combat.  No, it just wasn’t to keep their boots from becoming muddy, although, for some that might have been the case, the officer more concerned about their image than their duty.  They rode for the sake of higher vantage, the ability to overlook, review, plot the battlefield.  The vantage advantage. 

 

With a nod to President’s Day honored last Monday, this ability to see the big picture, to see beyond his own blinders and agendas, is regarded as one of Lincoln’s attributes as a great national healer.  The top three leadership qualities that made Lincoln great, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin, include these:  “The capacity to listen to differing points of view, to let his advisors argue with him, question his assumptions. He created a climate in which people felt free to disagree without fear of consequences.  The ability to learn on the job, acknowledge errors, profit from mistakes, withstand adversity, come through trials of fire.  Lincoln showed a ready willingness to share credit for success, creating what has been called “an emotional bank account, a reservoir of good feeling. Harry Truman once said: You can accomplish anything in life so long as you do not care who gets the credit.”

 

Here are the qualities of real professionals, whether presidents, surgeons, teachers, lawyers, pastors, along with those with whom they work alongside.    

 

The only accolade, the only trophy that matters, is doing the job right.